Welcome to everyone to Experience Point's webinar, Human Centered Design Explained. My name is Keith, and as a Master Facilitator with Experience Point, I work with organizations all over the world to deliver our Human Centered Design workshops. Joining me for our conversation today is my expert colleague, Tom Merrill, also a master facilitator at Experience Point. Tom has facilitated sessions for many of the Fortune five hundred companies that we work with. Thanks so much, Keith. I'm super grateful to be here with you all today. We know that life has recently been turned a bit upside down for all of us, and as we try our best to navigate this ever evolving environment, our hope is that some of what we discussed today might help you along your way. Terrific. Many of you joining our webinar today may not be familiar with who Experience Point is and what we do. So before we jump in, Experience Point is an award winning training company that helps people and organizations learn, experience, and apply design thinking through facilitated and technology led workshops. We seek to build the capabilities of individuals and to reinforce those capabilities within their surrounding environments. Our belief is that these two areas of focus have to work in tandem to create a lasting behavior change. So whether you join us through a virtual experience or an in person experience, we're committed to helping bring innovation and design thinking alive in your organization. Now, we're gonna be doing plenty of talking over the next forty five minutes, but this isn't for us, it's for you. So we'll have a number of polls, and invite questions early, and often to help make sure that you're getting what you need from this webinar. We won't likely get to every single question, but we'll sure do our best. In that spirit, we'd like to start with a poll to get familiar with the range of expertise that we've got on this call. So here's the poll. We'd like to know in the audience how familiar are you with human centered design or design thinking? And the answers range from not at all familiar to I've heard of it, I'm comfortable with the mindsets and methods, I've used it before, I'm a pro and I probably ought to be doing this webinar. So let's do a quick poll and see how our results come out here. All right, looks like we have a pretty good majority of folks that have heard of it. And this followed in second place by not familiar with it at all. So that's great. Keith and I will certainly try and bring out all the points that will help you get started in your journey with human centered design. Awesome. So what is human centered design? As this methodology becomes more pervasive, more definitions seem to emerge. You may have also heard the same term coined, as design thinking, which we generally use interchangeably with human centered design. It's in our experience that people generally find the term human centered design more intuitive to understand. So here's a definition that we like to use as it captures a number of human centered design or design thinking's defining characteristics. Human centered design is a nonlinear iterative problem solving process which seeks to understand users, challenges something, and redefine problems, and create innovative solutions. Is that all it does, Tom? That's outstanding. So but Tom, I am curious. You mentioned users. Users don't just mean end customers though. Right? Yeah, absolutely right, Keith. Sometimes it definitely means end customers, but as I know you've experienced, the term is much more expansive. A user can be anyone we're finding solutions for. Sure. I mean, I've seen it used in operations, in IT, internal process and change management teams, human resources, and so on. Basically, there are people involved in a problem that you're trying to solve, design thinking will at least add a little bit of value in problem framing and problem solving. Sometimes there's a misunderstanding when the word design is used though, as it can often be associated with product design only. Like I just said, human centered design or design thinking can be used to solve a variety of problems. And it's not just designers who can be the problem solvers. Everyone can use human centered design as long as they know how it works. Yeah, that's right, Keith. And to give you an idea of the power of human centered design, I wanna tell you a quick story. Sealess, a kitchenware company, wanted to create a new line of kitchen tools. As a part of their research, they observed users of kitchen tools, and in this case, they observed what we call extreme users, or users who engage with the product a lot, or maybe not very much at all. So they didn't just send out a survey and ask customers how they liked or used the tools, they actually went to places where they could observe these users in their natural environments. So I want everybody to think for a second about who might be an extreme user of kitchen tools. If you have young kids at home, I'm sure you've watched them interact with some of those, and who would be on the other end? Yep, exactly, professional chefs or folks who've been cooking all their life and are really familiar with kitchen tools. So here's one of the many new designs that the company came up with, with IDEO's help. You'll notice that this pizza cutter is missing the handle that traditional pizza cutters have. Here's why. Imagine a seven year old child using a traditional pizza cutter. They'd struggle to get the leverage on the handle to put enough weight into cutting the pizza. This is a challenge in the design of pizza cutters that average users have learned to compensate for, and in turn presents an opportunity for us as problem solvers. The result of Tealas' observations is a pizza cutter that's better for everyone, safer, easier to use, and super easy to clean, all as a result observing extreme users. You know, as this slide illustrates, this brief history here shows a number of events which track the gradual emergence of design thinking. And it's clear the methodology has reached beyond the realm of architecture and engineering where we might traditionally think about it. Yeah, and when I think about its evolution and adaptations today, I think we find that it keeps growing as folks find more and more uses for it. Even with the lack of literature on the correct application of design thinking in new industries, were able to put it to work and figure it out. Absolutely. IDEO made the transition from using design thinking for physical products to services as a result of a famous news report in nineteen ninety nine. Ted Koppel and the team from Nightline featured an audio team working on making a better version. After this episode aired, audio started to receive calls from people in industries like healthcare and others. Viewers instantly saw that these human centered techniques could help them address all kinds of challenges. So what's the value of using human centered design? After working with hundreds of clients at Experience Point, we've come up with four key benefits of human centered design. We thought we might take you through them really quickly here. The first one is perhaps the most obvious because as the name suggests, this is what human centered design is all about, keeping the end user or customer at the core of everything you do. So what does that mean exactly? Well, for example, when we're looking to find a solution to a challenge, we often make assumptions on what customers need or want without truly understanding them. With human centered design, we observe end users and speak with them to discover their needs so that we design solutions that meet those unmet needs. What is often the case is that what people say they do and what they actually do can be quite different. Yep, that's right, Keith. And secondly, by training your employees to use the process of design thinking to solve problems, it puts the responsibility on everyone in the organization to find creative and bold solutions. And this leads to something we all know and love, empowerment. We'll have a few more stats to share on this one shortly, but we're proud to have worked with many clients over the years who've seen new ideas evolve into brand new revenue streams or a reduction in costs. In one case, a large tech firm that we partnered with were able to attribute over one hundred million dollars in savings as a result of design thinking efforts across the firm. And finally, when companies use design thinking to solve problems, they create an environment where people aren't afraid to fail. Why? Because through a design thinking approach, you're building low fidelity prototypes of your ideas before bringing them to market. This limits the risk associated with developing new ideas and lowers the cost of producing those ideas. And we'll share an example of this a little bit later. Great, thanks Tom. So this Venn diagram is helpful to understand when we're talking about the human centered design process. A huge point of distinction between this approach and many others is that we start from a place of desirability. Rather than beginning with the end in mind, we focus on first understanding what matters to users. Where traditionally we may have approached a challenge with a solution already in mind and began by assessing both its feasibility. Can we do this? Do we have the technology and so on? And viability. Should we do this? Does it make financial sense, etcetera? In human centered design, we first think about the needs of the user and designing solutions to meet them where they are. We'll go into more detail on this later and take you through a methodical step by step introduction to these concepts. But for the moment, Tom, you've worked with many clients as it relates to this Venn diagram. Where do you find most people tend to focus? The truth is, as you already suggested, Keith, that most people tend to default to feasibility and viability when considering solutions to just about any challenge. Often though, we find that folks who tend to be good at feasibility and viability end up developing tools or products and processes that people don't adopt and don't use, whether they're internal or external users. And the question becomes, why aren't people using what we make? And this often leads to frustration. Right, Tom. Look, it's not that we won't get to feasibility and viability, we just don't burden ourselves with it too early. By focusing on desirability and learning from our users, we mitigate our tendency to make assumptions or draw conclusions based on our own experiences or biases. We ensure that our user remains at the center of our problem solving from start to finish. The other thing folks tend to find valuable is that it helps with the challenge of buy in. When you start with a compelling case based on user desirability, and we'll jump into the methodology soon, you'll find that your key stakeholders, users, and so on are brought into the design process early. As a result, the question of buying by the wayside when you're no longer selling ideas internally and instead are truly co creating with your users. So what is the business value of design? You know, there's lots of studies in the market and you can see from McKinsey and Company that they indicated that tech companies with top quartile McKinsey design index scores outperformed industry benchmarks by as much as two to one. The Design Management Institute reports that the design value index study shows ten year returns yielding two eleven percent of that of the S and P five hundred. You know, Fast Company reports that when teams iterate on five or more different solutions, they are fifty percent more likely to launch something successfully. So the other related dimension here, which we regrettably don't have a statistic for, is the increase in employment engagement. We've seen this excuse me, employee engagement. We've seen this over and over again. There's something magical that happens when people are able to bring their whole creative selves to their work. One client described it to us as awaking her people from a deep slumber. Yeah, that's a great point, Tom, and I think broadly speaking, the impact exists as with most things in the macro stats, like what we see here, as well as in those specific heartfelt personal stories where someone's career has changed as a result. And that only makes sense, Keith. People are happiest when they're set up for success. Looking at this list of critical capabilities from the World Economic Forum, it's evident to those of us who understand design thinking that the methodology squarely addresses the top three: complex, problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity. And after our talk today, you'll likely see this for yourself. Speaking of creativity, we mightily recommend the book Creative Confidence by the Kelly brothers of the Stanford D School and the founders of IDEO. So Tom, it feels like now might be a good time to do another quick poll. We train people to build capability in human centered design, and we also train organizations to embed these skills and help drive a culture of change. I'd love to get a sense of how our participants' organizations are using human centered thinking, if at all. So we're posting the poll now. How is your organization using human centered design? And the answers range from not at all, we've started to experiment with it, We have a deep expertise in some specialized groups. We're rolling out these skills to a broad group of employees or what's human centered design? Let's see what those results look like. All right, so lots of As and Bs. So it's relatively new to most folks who are joining us here today. Terrific. I'm glad we have a chance to introduce you to this stuff. And there's one, what's human centered design? Outstanding, all right. Oh, several, all right. I appreciate your candor and your honesty. All right, well, we'll get back to the slide deck. Tom, over to you. Yep, thanks, Keith. The question always arises, how do you get to that overlap, the sweet spot of the Venn diagram? Well, here is the human centered six step process that we use at Experience Point, and that we share with our friends at IDEO. First, we look at the steps that will help us to find opportunities to innovate. And then, and only then, we take steps to create solutions. We're gonna dive into each of these steps in more detail, describe some of the challenges with each, and give you some thoughts on how you can quickly get started with any of these steps. Terrific, Tom. Before we do that, I thought I might share a quote with everyone as well, because this is important not to lose sight of. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration. And that really sums up the human centered design approach. It encourages us to put in the hard work in order to truly understand the user and their needs before we build those ingenious solutions for them. That's right. So where do we begin with human centered design? Well, we start by asking a great question. Let me give you a quick story of how this first step was taken when Bank of America hired IDEO to help them solve a problem that they had in the early 2000s, when they were just beginning to issue debit cards. The problem, customers were not accustomed to using these new cards for purchases to buy things that they used to pay for with cash. Bank of America initially thought to solve this problem, they used techniques they'd done before: incentivize the customer through mail, ads, bank leaflets, etcetera. They even tried printing a money clip with the BOA logo on it with a coin slot in the middle to remind customers to save. Their question probably went something like, how do we get customers to use their debit cards more often? The bank wanted to avoid the fees incurred when using credit cards. When IDEA was brought in, they actually went to observe actual Bank of America customers in action. And they saw many of these customers eliciting this behavior. And when they're writing the amounts in their check registers, they would often round up the amount of the check, or they would round up the amount of the actual check to pay a bill. So IDEO worked with Bank of America to create this Keep the Change program. Some of you might be enrolled in that today. Here's how it worked. Each time a Bank of America customer used their debit card, the bank software would automatically round up the purchase price to the next whole dollar. And then the entire difference of the purchase price and the whole dollar amount would then be deposited into their savings account. BOA wouldn't take a cut of it. As a matter of fact, for the first year of the program, they'd even match a portion of the deposit for the first few months. So likely, IDEO helped Bank of America reframe the question, so it was focused on a benefit to the customer. And I bet the question was something like this: How might we help people, or how might we help Bank of America customers save effortlessly? The rest of the story? The Keep the Change program grew so popular with Bank of America customers that at the end of the first year of the program, it resulted in an addition of three point two billion dollars to BOA's balance sheet. You see, the Bank of America example highlights some of the challenges that come about when we take a traditional approach to problem solving. First, our natural tendency is to think about the problem we're trying to solve from our perspective rather than from our users. Originally, the Bank of America was thinking about how increased debit card transactions would benefit the bank, and not as much about how this behavior could benefit their customers. Another pitfall we tend to encounter when tackling an issue is that we bake a solution into the question. We were guilty of this at experience point, so we had a client who wanted his team to create a business wide dashboard. So his desired starting question was, how might we create the best dashboard ever? The solution, the dashboard has been baked into the question, and its presence may well restrict thinkers from reaching beyond the restrictions and perceived limitations of what a dashboard is. So we nudged him to try something a little more open ended like, How might we deliver the information we need to help managers make better decisions? The dashboard might have been an answer, but it could also be something completely different. What do you think, Keith? You know, Tom, let me echo that comment around having a solution baked right in. So often teams start with a challenge like, how might we become more aligned with another business group? And this is a chance to take a step back and say, what is a lack of alignment keeping you from doing and is alignment the only way to get there? Normally it isn't. And what's the risk of skipping this step? Well, if you don't come up with a great guiding question, you run the risk of jumping straight to the first solution that pops into your mind rather than exploring the opportunity to do something very, very different. Yeah, and there's a simple formula for coming up with a great starting point. Usually, we think innovation starts with a great idea. Well, our challenge to people who find themselves getting excited by an early idea is to hit the pause button and then see if they can flip that idea into a question. So first, try and think about your user. Who are the people that you're trying to help? And second, what's the key benefit or behavior you're trying to give them? And then finally, you add these three magic words, how might we, and form a question. So how might we help user gain benefit? Let me give you some examples. How might we help schoolchildren make healthier choices? Or how might we help long distance truck drivers stay connected to those they love? Or how might we help our colleagues stay focused in meetings? We always implore people, fall in love with a great question rather than a single idea. Terrific, thanks Tom. And of course, that great question sets us up nicely to move into what is one of my favorite parts about design thinking, the next step, which is about gathering inspiration. What I really like about this methodology overall is that it isn't about learning how to conjure new ideas out of thin air, but rather it's an intentional way of building a robust qualitative fact base to help us better understand the problem we're trying to solve. Again, what differentiates it from other problem solving methodologies is that it's human centered, but has that same focus on data and building the right fact base. And this step of gathering inspiration is a crucial part. In short, we use this as a chance to go talk to people we normally don't talk to, to learn things we normally don't learn, and ultimately help us come up with ideas we normally wouldn't have come up with. And to do that in particular, we always talk to extreme users. The story you were telling earlier, Tom, about the pizza cutter is a great example of those extreme users. There's another story I'm reminded of that really illustrates what people say they do and what they actually do can be quite different. And this was some work that our friends at IEO were doing with a German pharmaceutical company that made amongst other things, arthritis medication for their patients. And so they were conducting some research around the medication and its packaging and so on. And they met with an elderly patient and they surveyed her. Part of the survey included a query about the pill bottle. One of the asks was, you know, do you have any trouble accessing your pills or opening your pill bottle? And her response to them was, No, I don't have any problem. And so they completed the survey with, No, I don't have any problem. But wisely, because they were conducting this in her home meeting with her in her natural environment that they said, Terrific, can you show us? She said, sure. She brought them in the kitchen, opened the cupboard, pulled a new bottle down off the shelf, and then fired up her electric meat slicer there on the counter and sliced the top right off. Not a pill bottle on earth can stand up to an electric meat slicer, right? No problem. Of course, obviously there was a problem. And it goes to show you how people respond to surveys in a way that may not be reflective of what they actually do. I love that story, Keith, and that photo always really brings home the difference between what people say and what they actually do. So once we get this information, what do we do with it? Think about somebody who's ultra passionate about the topic and just go have a conversation with them. Let them explain how they see the world, not how we think they see the world. And once you've gone out and built this fact base, it sets you up for synthesis, to make sense of what you've seen and what you've heard your extreme users tell you. So if the last step was about collecting the dots, now it's time to connect the dots. Our goal is to make sense of our observations, and in doing so, spot opportunities that hopefully few others have noticed. An example, when most of us were growing up, the makers of children's disposable diapers focused on their product's capability or capacity to absorb, if you will. That was the basis of competition among the leading brands. But then Huggies had this great insight. Diapers were also about growth and the development of children, and graduating from diapers was a big deal. So they created a new product line, Huggies Pull Ups, when kids would graduate to underwear, and they continue to be massively successful to this day. What do you think, Keith? Tom, I think sometimes this step in the process can be fraught with the greatest amount of insecurity. People sometimes worry that after all they've observed, they don't have a very compelling insight. I recall working with a pharmaceutical firm, as an example, that was disappointed because after all their observation work, the best insight they had was something they felt they already knew, specifically that there was a stigma associated with their product. I hear you, Keith. And the truth is, that's really not a terrible outcome. Even if your first draft of insights lines up with something you thought you knew before, at least now you have a fact base to back up why you and your team thought that was true. We talk about how design thinking is iterative. Though we've gone through these first three steps in a fairly straightforward fashion, here's one of those big iterative moments to me, where one might realize that the insights don't have that moment or quality yet, and it's an invitation to take another look at maybe, one, did we frame the right question? Or two, are there other folks that we need to talk to? Or three, are there different questions that we need to be asking those users? Keith? What we try to help people understand is that as long as your insight helps nudge you in a direction that you weren't thinking about before, then you've got something good. So in the case of the pharma company, they realized that their previous attempts at educating prescribers, they hadn't focused on helping doctors understand the stigma dimension of their product. Yeah. And one simple way to start developing your synthesis muscles comes from this exercise developed by Stanford's D School. Go to your grocery store, to the cereal aisle, and see if you can develop a two by two chart that captures the vast range of products that you see. We have an example on this slide. Admittedly, though, my favorite story was of a group of serial executives who created a two by two that looked at, on one axis, fun versus healthy, and on the other axis, adult versus kid. And when they positioned all of the cereal brands in this matrix, they found that there were not a whole lot of adult fun cereals. So they thought of a new product: sexy flakes. Tom, this is a is a dark rabbit hole we're headed down here. Just because bringing sexy back work for Justin Timberlake doesn't necessarily mean it's the right call for breakfast cereals, though I must admit I'm not an expert in either field. Nor am I, Keith, but the point is a great framework can really help us reveal opportunities at the individual and the market level. Yeah, it can also set us up nicely to leverage these outstanding insights to support our solutioning efforts. As clever as any of our insights may be, they are current state backward looking declarations. That is to say, are a reflection of what is and what has been. We want to adjust our perspective to one that is forward looking and thus we use our insight to frame a more focused design challenge using that how might we framing we did at the onset. So for instance, in the pharma case I was just highlighting, the insight about the stigma associated with their product may have led to a more focused design challenge like how might we help doctors inspire confidence and comfort in their patients when prescribing our product? A terrific launch pad for a brainstorm. Brainstorming, brainstorming is a powerful, powerful tool in the design process. But brainstorming effectively requires some rules and some structure, which to some may sound counterintuitive, but set teams up collectively for success. I'm reminded Tom of a terrific story about Pacific power and gas in the Northwestern United States and in the part of the country they operate in. They have fairly severe winters, as I know you are familiar with. And they have trouble in that part of the world with snow and ice collecting on the power lines. And many of the power lines that they service are in pretty remote areas. And for a long time, the folks at Pacific Power and Gas struggled to figure out how to keep the snow and ice off the power lines. And the only solution they had for a long time was sending personnel into the field to climb the poles and knock the snow and ice off. It was hazardous, you know, risky work and costly. It was very expensive. And they had worked for a long time to try to figure out an alternate solution. And when they were introduced to design thinking as approach to tackling their challenges, they had a brainstorm around trying to solve this and they employed some of the critical rules. One of the rules they employed was encouraging wild ideas, right? And during the conversation when they were brainstorming around how to solve for one of the participants noted that in the same remote areas, they have problem with the snow and ice buildup. There's also a bear problem in that part of the world. So if we could only get train the bears to climb the poles and and knock the snow and ice off, we'd have no problem. We'd be laughing. Of course, that generated some laughter in the room and it inspired an interesting line of thought. Of course, another guideline we operate under is that we want to defer judgment. So rather than judging what they heard, listened to what was offered and then they started to build on it. And so somebody else said, well, you know, we wouldn't necessarily need to train the bears to climb the pools if we could draw them up there somehow. Maybe we could place honey pots on top of the pools and then the bears would just go up there to chase the honey and they'd knock the ice and snow off. Of course, that generated another round of laughter, Tom, as you can imagine. But then following that, somebody else said, building on the idea, well, how would you even get the honey pots up there? So another person suggested that, well, we have a fleet of helicopters here. Maybe we could use a helicopter to fly along the lines and place the honey pots on top of the pools. Of course, the actual solution that they landed on was helicopters actually now fly along the lines and the downdraft from the chopper blades knocks the snow and ice off of the power lines. So they don't have to send people out into the field. It's much more cost effective. It's much easier to keep the lines clean and people are far less risk. It's a great story. And Tom, it illustrates that there's a handful of rules for brainstorming that are not only good for brainstorming, you could use them in other meetings or just general collaboration, several of which I've highlighted here in the bear story. Is there one that stands out for you? Yeah, Keith, the the one that's always challenging for me and indeed for a lot of our clients, is encouraging wild ideas. It's hard for us to do because it feels like we're being ridiculous and not really paying attention to the problem. Yeah, too true, Tom. Of course, there's always time later in the process for to converge around the best of our ideas and apply some pragmatism to them. I really like being able to segment out the diverging from the converging, and as a result by deferring judgment, that's really the one that I think is most powerful. Tom, do you have any tips on how teams can effectively brainstorm? Yeah, absolutely, Keith. So design thinking has these two broad sort of movements. One where we're diverging and creating a lot of different choices, and this is exactly what's happening in when we're brainstorming solutions to a problem. So, challenge your team to come up with at least fifty different ideas, fifty different ways to address something. Also encourage your team to come up like Keith's story just did with incremental ideas, pushing beyond the obvious. In in improv comedy, we call it the yes and technique or or, Pixar uses this. They they call it plussing. And that's where the magic really starts to happen. You know, one of the most popular questions we're hearing right now is, How do I brainstorm with remote teams? Now, are a ton of tools and apps that answer this question, but we prefer not to let perfect be the enemy of pretty good. We'd say schedule some time and make sure we put a time limit on it. For example, we have five minutes to come up with as many ideas as possible, or have an icebreaker so that everyone feels comfortable participating, Or maybe it's, how's everybody feeling today and what are your expectations for this project? Or turn on your camera to get as close to that face to face feel as possible. Our friends at IDEO have several mantras, among them is a personal favorite of mine, build to think. The idea is to find really quick inexpensive ways to create representations of your ideas. In so doing, you'll find it accelerates your ability to think through the specifics of how your solution must work. Yes, and now what you build depends on the nature of your solution. For tangible products, it's sensible to try and create a physical prototype, something that suggests the form and function of what it is you wish to create, and something that your users, the people that you're designing for, can interact with. For digital solutions like an app, you might want to sketch mock interfaces so that you begin to imagine the flow of navigating the app or the process. And for processes or systems or other intangible solutions, we find that there's nothing more powerful than a storyboard that in just a few frames describes the world with your new idea in it. Right, Tom. The challenge is that when people hear the term prototype, they often think of high fidelity versions of a product that are, you know, one step removed from what the final solution will actually be in the world. And that's not what we're talking about. We're looking to build something that prompts our thinking rather than something proves the product or excites the marketplace. The risk of not doing this step first, thinking about something that hasn't existed before is simply harder to do without this rapid prototyping method. The cognitive load is much greater when we're trying to imagine something and describe it in words alone, rather than when we start creating representations of the same thing. More importantly though, if you skip this step, you risk missing out on all the incredibly rich feedback that can result when people, whether it be your colleagues or customers or end users, when they have a chance to react to early versions of your ideas. Yeah, that's so true, Keith. And people often ask, well, how do we get started with this? It's super easy to storyboard. You bisect the page vertically and horizontally, and then you have your four frames of a storyboard. Then take an idea you have and challenge yourself to draw how a user would interact with your idea in four simple frames. You know, the truth is anytime you've ever set up a whiteboard to map out a PowerPoint deck before you've actually opened your computer? That's an example of prototyping, or you've mapped out a process flow before rolling it out. These are all good steps towards making your ideas tangible. We'd contend that the more you put your users at the center of your prototypes, the better and faster you'll be. And speaking of users Yeah, and Keith, we're now testing to learn. Even when you're at this point, having done all the work you've done, there's still a healthy number of assumptions that no doubt live in your ideas. And that's to be expected. If we didn't have some optimism behind our work that we can make things better, we'd probably never get anything done. And there are ways that we can go and learn more about how our ideas will live in the world before we spend too much time and a whole lot of money to roll something out that may need a little maturing or pivoting first. Let's take this idea for example. IDEO was working with a town in California, and they really wanted to increase their sustainability efforts. And so one of the ideas they had was to make an entire office park more green and sustainable. And rather than try this experiment on the whole office park, They picked one floor of one building, and they had this question that was something like, what happens when we give people a sustainable option? And so early one morning, they went into this office, and those ceramic mugs that you see normally lived up in a cabinet above the sink there. So one morning, they came into the office before anybody got there. They put all those mugs down, and then the Styrofoam cups that normally live there, they put up in the cabinet. Then they wrote out this sign that says Help yourself to an eco friendly mug. Place in dishwasher when done. And then they faded into the background because they wanted to see what would happen when people were presented with this option. And within twenty minutes, all of the ceramic mugs had been placed back in the cabinet and were replaced by the Styrofoam cups that were originally there, And the sign had been taken off of the wall, crumpled up, and placed in the recycle bin. So as a experiment, it was wildly successful because they learned something that they'd never expected. They learned that it was more than just the employees who worked on that floor, that they had to take into consideration when designing their sustainability plan. Yep, you guessed it, the cleaning crew took one look at that setup and said, Oh no, we are not paid enough to be picking up eco friendly mugs all over this office, which we will be doing if this plan is in place. So IDEO quickly learned that they had to take everybody in that office into consideration when designing their plans. What do you think, Keith? Tom, I just want to reinforce the goal here is to learn and not validate, right? And we keep saying that because it's true in these early prototypes and experiments, we're still focused on desirability and what it looks like in the real world. As you firm up your point of view on desirability in a fact based way, then you can get to things like feasibility and viability. You're right, Keith. And let's sum up these two parts again, the big two parts. We have finding opportunities to begin and then creating solution. And as mentioned earlier, this looks like it's a straight on linear process, but in fact, it often isn't. For example, you might get to the place where you're gonna synthesize for action, and you feel like you didn't get enough insights or the right insights from your customer observations. This would bring you back to the gather inspiration step. Or you might be to the end of the process and prototype a solution that isn't really resonating with your end user, and this would bring you back to the beginning potentially. So in short, the six step process of innovation can be used in ways that work for your team and for the solution that you're trying to solve for. So look, before we get too close to wrapping up today, Tom, I'm curious to know how ready, willing, and able are the organizations for our participants to take on a culture of innovation? So let's do a quick poll. How ready, willing, and able is your organization to take on a culture of innovation? We are all systems go is one of our answers. The time is right, but there's resistance. We're hungry, but don't know how. We have too many other priorities just now, or most people don't care and don't know how to get started. Let's see what the poll results look like. Wow, it's mixed poll results there. It looks like there's some enthusiasm though, a bunch of overall systems go and the time is right. Of course, I'm not all that surprised with the other priorities given the current climate where we're all dealing with a current reality that's requiring our focus for sure. Interesting, that's great. Thanks to everyone for responding. Well, let's get back at it. So at Experience Point, we believe that to truly create a culture of innovation at an organization, you must train both the organization and the people within it. And we help companies achieve this. Firstly, with our innovation workshops, we train people in the design thinking process, so they have the skill sets and mindsets to do it themselves. But if we train just a subset of an organization, those folks will find it difficult to go back into that same organization where the mindsets, processes and daily habits are status quo, which is why we also know that training the organization is just as important. We do that by first training everyone in the organization so that everyone is essentially singing from the same song sheet, and then working with executives and key stakeholders on ensuring the processes and systems are in place for everyone to do their best work. It's only after you train both the organization and the people in it, that you can truly have a culture of innovation. And a lot of people, Keith, ask us how we can get started with this. How can we start right away? Getting started with design thinking on an individual basis is pretty easy, as we've described at each step of the design thinking process. To start to see these methods and behavior come to life more broadly, however, requires a little bit more. We'd be happy to share more about what we've seen work best, but here's a little something to get you thinking about who you should involve as your allies in bringing human centered design to your organization. Typically, you need an an executive sponsor, someone for whom innovation truly matters. If they have the need and the fire in the eyes, then you have a great partner who can help you make progress in the face of organizational barriers. Also, you'll need a core team. This is the group of people who will not only think about how to best introduce these new human centered design behaviors, but how these behaviors can be supported and sustained over time. For example, this team can help imagine how to weave these new behaviors into existing management systems. And finally, you'll wanna think about what we refer to at Experience Point as a catalyst infrastructure. This is a collection of people who feel passionate about this work and who can be frontline workers in the education of others. These catalysts not only contextualize design thinking methods for their colleagues, but they're the go to people for support for questions that inevitably arise. Great, thanks, Tom. So that about wraps up our webinar for today. Before we get to answering your questions, I'd like to invite all of you to visit our blog, The Prototype for Innovation and Human Centered Design Articles and Insights. Please feel encouraged to drop by. And also, you'd like to get in touch with Tom or I, we welcome you to send us an email or connect with us on LinkedIn. We're happy to answer any questions you may have. And that should leave us a few minutes for questions here. I'm going to turn it back over to Holly for the Q and A. Alright, guys. Thank you so much for that information. So that leaves us about twelve minutes or so for questions. And folks, if you've not yet submitted your questions, go ahead and send those over to me. We'll get to what we can in the time that we have left. So let's see. Good question here from Sonya. This one came in pretty early. She says, do you agree that done is better than perfect when it comes to design thinking? Oh, absolutely. So we you know, especially when it comes to prototyping, I think the sooner you can get some version of your idea out in front of the people that you're designing for perfect happens. Perfect doesn't even happen when we get to minimally, what we call MVP status, Minimally Viable Product Status. The most important thing is to get something into your user's hands or eyes that they can interact with and see where, and provide feedback on where your idea is going. What do you think, Keith? Yeah, Tom, I absolutely agree. You know, we often say in design that best is the enemy of better, and we never want to assume that we know what the absolute solution is. Our users are going to educate us around that. So getting something in their hands quickly, so we can elicit a reaction and then iterate on that idea and evolve it to meet them more readily is critical. So yeah, I couldn't agree more. All right, guys, thanks for answering that. And I'm sure that puts some rest to the minds of perfectionists out there. So let's see, next question. We'll move on to Karen. She says, how might we deliver this mentoring program to make this experience truly valuable to the mentees? And does this fit the better question model, for an existing program? Well, a starting point would always be, and I know Tom will echo this, a starting point will always be to, you know, engage with your users in mind at the front end. Design thinking serves you very well in understanding user need and then creating a program that meets them where they are. So it's a great question, right? How might we enhance the participant experience of our mentoring program is a great question to ask and a great design thinking exercise to explore. And design as a methodology may also serve in the mentoring process, right? It helps you to not only focus on your user, but to design solutions that meet them where they are. And it gives you a chance to explore multiple solutions, some of which may work and some of which may not. And that's okay because you move so rapidly to the point where you're prototyping that you don't have a lot of time, money, or energy invested. Tom, thoughts? Yeah, I'm gonna go back to that original question, and what struck me about the way it was asked was how might we, you know, make our mentoring program better? The focus on that was really the product. And so the way I might flip that, if you're going to put it in a more of a design thinking framework, is how might we help our employees participating in the mentoring program create a better plan for their enrichment or help them see areas of growth, their personal areas of growth for the company, or really turning it so it's more user focused, so less on the actual program and more on what are the benefits that you want your folks that are going through this program to have at the end of it? All right, guys, thanks for that answer. And yes, I think that does hit the point that we wanted to. Karen, if we need to elaborate or if there's something else that you would like to know, feel free and send me that information over. So with that, we'll jump to a question from Crystal now. So would you include the sales team on projects like this or would you focus on product marketing, management, and executives? I guess I would include Crystal. Everybody. Go ahead, Keith. I was just gonna say, it's a great question, Crystal, and Tom's right. I would include everybody. Often, you know, participants in the workshops will ask us, like, when do we apply this methodology? Who should use this? When do we apply it? And it sounds sometimes on the surface like like this is for project teams specifically. The truth is this is really a way of thinking about any challenges you're facing that sort of fit three criteria. Anytime you have a challenge that is complex, that is to say, there's more than one path you could pursue to follow it, and it's not apparent which path to take, that's an indication that design thinking could work for you. Anytime you are tackling a challenge that is meaningful, that is to say the impact to the organization and to your users, whoever they may be, would be disproportionately impactful, then that's an indication that design thinking might work for you. And any time that humans are at the center of your challenge, then that's the number one indicator that design thinking might work for you because of its human centered nature. The fourth unofficial criteria I often refer people to is, you know, anytime you think you already know the answer. Because design thinking very elegantly challenges you to test your assumptions and either validate what you already believe to be true, or in fact, it opens your eyes up to some opportunity you had never thought of before. Tom? Yeah, that's right, Keith, and I'm struck by, you know, at Experience Point, we don't just help our customers learn this methodology, we actually eat our own dog food. And, you know, when we put together teams to solve complex client questions or work through our own processes, we actually have teams from sales and marketing and product and creative, you know, all working together, because the diversity of thought that we all bring to a problem is much greater than if just one function or one department tackled it. I'm often amazed at what my colleagues across the company can bring to a solution. All right. Cool, guys. Thanks so much for sharing. Let's see. Next question that we have, let's get to one from Eric. He says, are there some specific points to consider when applying these ideas to agile software development? Eric, thanks for the question. It's a good one. I'll comment briefly and then I'll and then I'll hand it off to Tom, but I just want to comment on how, design thinking is, is a terrific complement actually to the agile methodologies. So where agile's focus is on understanding user behavior and then enhancing existing solutions by applying the learnings from understanding that user behavior in a systematic, deliberate kind of a way. Design thinking is sort of the greenfield front end piece of that, if you will. Design thinking starts with user behavior before there's ever a solution in mind, and we use what we learn from our users to help define the opportunity to solution, then those solutions we iterate on applying methodologies like agile going forward once we bring them to life in the world. Tom? Yeah. No. I I totally agree, Keith. Design thinking is definitely the the front end of agile, so it gets you to the place where you get that new idea in place, the new product, the new system, and then bring it to the Agile methodology. All right, guys. Thank you. And so just to share some good news, Karen wrote in and said that the answers were perfect and she says, thank you. Way to pull that off, guys. We got that taken care of. All right. So let's see. I think we might have time for one more question. Let's get to this one from Anna. She says, Some organizations say they listen, but yet persist at rolling solutions that are rather cost containing to them that negatively impact internal and external engagement. So how can we make these folks understand? So the the key tenet in, in in design thinking is you never wanna force people to do anything. We never wanna make our users do something. We always build from from the perspective of desirability. So I I turn that question on its head, and and it might be like, how do we help our managers? How do we help those people want to help our customers? Or how do we create solutions that are desirable for everybody? What do you think, Keith? It's Anna, it is a classic age old challenge and it makes your organization different than exactly zero percent of the organizations we encounter or work with in the world. So I hear you and you know, the number of times I've run across this where organizations tend to be internally focused, tend to rely on their internal expertise to develop solutions from. They don't spend a whole lot of time with their users. And then, you know, they work hard to massage their idea into the best version of their idea it could be. When they launch into the world and the world doesn't react to it the way they think they should, you know, they find fault with people's behavior and not the solution. And then they try to develop a training program or write a brochure to educate people about how they should deal with this brilliant solution. The key here is, I think, bring the user in early in the process, obviously. And for those folks challenged to get them engaged in the front end of that process, to have them really talk to the users before a solution's ever even been considered, talk to the users and understand their behavior. And you'll be surprised at how many eyes will be opened by engaging in some empathetic engagement with, with users before they're trying to validate a solution they've already they've already come up with. Alright. Perfect, guys. And that takes us right to the end of the hour. So we did have quite a few questions that we didn't get to. Folks will be sure to pass your question and name on to the, Experience Point team so that they can get back with you at a later time. So we'll go ahead and start to wrap up with the usual information. First of all, by letting everyone know that today's webcast has been approved for HRCI and CHRM credit. Give us just about twenty four hours to get those processed up online, and then you can check out your MyHCI dashboard. From there, go to the learning section and download that transcript. One more last thank you to Tom, Keith, and to you for being here. We hope everyone has a great rest of your day.